


The Twain Were Casting Dice

by Siamesa



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous minor character death, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Gen, POV Outsider, Post-Canon, Reunions, Treasure Island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-31 07:09:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8569021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siamesa/pseuds/Siamesa
Summary: In which it isn't Billy they find at the Admiral Benbow Inn.
Treasure Island-era AU.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Смерть и Смерть играли в кости](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10681347) by [Lazurit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lazurit/pseuds/Lazurit)



> Many descriptions, a number of lines, and much of the early dialogue taken from Treasure Island.
> 
> Title from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
> 
> (Because I was terrible at thinking up titles until I realized I could just grab portentous-sounding things from semi-relevant poems).
> 
> Also my first fic in this fandom!

It was in the year of grace 17-- that our part in the troubles began.  That was the year that the old Captain took up residence at the Admiral Benbow Inn.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, standing in the street before the inn.  He looked up at the old Admiral himself, in peeling paint on weathered wood, and for a moment there was a flash of lightning in his eyes.  The next, it was gone, and I suppose I remember it so well because it was the closest to alive he'd look for years to come.  In a moment he was shaking his head and plodding through the door, and in another he had slumped into a seat to call for rum.

There he sat, and there he remained.  He was a silent man by custom, and I suppose that was what brought him to a quiet inn and not a Bristol public house, though the latter might well have served his purpose better - for it was clear, even to me at my age, that here was a man using rum in the place of hemlock.

He paid promptly, with good silver.  That fact and a natural pity kept him in my father's good graces, despite the occasional late night when the Captain's habitual silence deserted him, and the inn rang with slurred song.  More than once, I lay awake in bed, listening to the growling voice, _fifteen men on a dead man's chest._ It was the same song, each time, and it never failed to send me into troubled dreams of black flags and bloody men.

It was those dreams, I think, which inspired me one night to creep downstairs, more afraid of the shadows in the corners than of being caught by my mother.  The Captain was slumped in the parlor, lips moving without sound.  He was a broadshouldered man, but hollow, with flesh sinking in on his bones, and he'd hollowed further even in the time since he'd arrived.  In the dim light, his face was mottled grey and red.

I had reached the doorframe when his arm twitched, and I jumped back.

" _Rum,_ Hawkins."  One eye opened enough to glare.

I risked a few steps forward.  "The bottle's by your feet."

A brief flail of his arm risked knocking the bottle over, and I darted forward to forestall the noise.  Handing it to him felt a sin, but I'd just awoken from one pirate trying to kill me, and had no interest in seeing the Captain become a second.

That he _was_ a pirate, of course, I was convinced, in the way that only a small boy can be convinced of anything.  There were any number of honest sailors who were scowling, scarred, and trying to drown themselves in drink, of course, but there was precious little of interest in having one of _them_ beneath my roof.

"Is a dead man's chest a coffin?"

He took a drink of rum.  "Go away, boy," he finally spat - or words to that effect.

This, then, was the closest I ever came to a heart-to-heart with the Captain.  Despite that, I think, I was less afraid of him than anyone else who'd ever disturbed him at his drink.  I watched him waste away drinking as I watched my father waste away coughing, and I resisted both deaths with almost equal fervor, the same way I began to resist any change at the Admiral Benbow.  There would always be peeling white paint on the door, and a pirate half-asleep in the parlor, and there would always be my father, alive and strong.

We were all lying to ourselves, in that way.  We were all lying to ourselves about a great number of things, and I at least had more excuse than most.  Looking back, it is only my father's illness that gives us any excuse for keeping the Captain on after the incident with the second sailor.

He, too, came up the street at midday, trailed by two boys and an enormous sea-chest.  He was a tall man, taller than my father, and had a scar on his cheek like a sabre cut, a dirty, livid white.  He caught sight of me, and called for a glass of rum.

My father brought it to him, and I stayed tightly by his side, eyes locked on the new visitor.

"This is a handy cove," he said at length, "and a pleasant grog-shop.  Much company, mate?"

"Little enough," said my father.  "We've only one guest at the present."

He narrowed his eyes at that, and let loose a couple seeking questions.  My father satisfied him to the point that the Captain was an old man, who'd been with us near a year and bothered no one, though it was only the length of the stay that set the visitor's shoulders at ease.

"And I suppose - though you'll think it a strange question - I suppose he has both his legs?"

_I_ certainly thought it a strange question, though my father answered quickly enough.  The visitor smiled, and tossed us something about a man he'd sailed with once, whose peg-legged pacing kept the whole ship up at night.

I followed the boys carrying the sea-chest, and saw it safely lodged in our second guest room.  I waited until they'd left before peering in our first at the Captain.

He was still abed, tossing in his sleep, and I retreated quickly.  My mother was the only one who'd ever dare to wake him of a morning.  As far as anyone knew, the Captain remained in his room the rest of that day, which wasn't uncommon enough to bear notice.  As for that night...

These are the only facts.  The visitor, whose name to this day I do not know, retired to bed around ten in the evening, well-fortified with rum.  At some time in the dark of the night, I awakened to a dull thump, and remained, frozen upright in the darkness.  My hand closed around a book on my bedstead, the closest thing to a weapon at hand.  A clock chimed two.  A door shut.  These were the only sounds I heard, and, though I remember nothing but staring into the black, at some point sleep must have taken me again.

In the morning, the visitor was gone.  His sea-chest remained.  My sleep, as might have been expected, was fitful.  I was the first of the family to awaken, and in the parlor I found the Captain, to all appearances drunk and asleep.

My parents were not overly concerned.  They assumed that the visitor, having left his sea-chest, would return.  After two days, my mother went down to the harbor to ask about our erstwhile guest and his ship; after five, half the neighborhood was searching for him.  They found nothing.

After seven days, we gathered around the chest.

It was unlocked, which struck us all as suspicious.  But then, none of us could swear to ever seeing a lock upon it.  My mother had made the bed in the room the morning after it was slept in, but since then the room had been kept locked and secured.

My father pushed up the lid, arms straining.  "Good God."

Mother gasped.  I peered in, eyes wide as an owl's.

"No thief's been here, then," said my mother, eventually, with a breathless laugh.

One hears of lords with shabby clothes and merchant princes who live on bread and water.  Perhaps our visitor had been one of that sort, though more likely he had robbed one.  There was enough gold in that sea-chest to buy the inn.  Visions of feasts and horses swam through my mind.

It was not to be.  My father spent one coin from that chest on several locks, and it remained in that room to await its owner's return.

There is one final detail from those troubling events.  It was my job to clean the ashes and tidy the hearths.  I paid careful attention to the fireplace in the visitor's erstwhile room, and tracked ash across the floor paying careful attention to every other nook and cranny of what I was now half-convinced was a murder site.  On the hearth, I found a burnt scrap of paper, a fragment of a letter or a map.  It bore two letters.  The first was a J, and the second nearly unreadable - an, E, an F, or a fancy A.  I guarded my clue more jealously than I would have any of the visitor's golden coins.

I would like to say that I became more afraid of the Captain, or at least more wary of him.  This was not the case.  My conviction that he was a murderer, my reliving of each detail and every noise from the night I sat awake, only made him an object of more interest.  I tried repeatedly to coax him into conversation.  He became ever the worse for drink.

In the year 17--, my father died.

January that year was bitterly cold, and the snow meant little custom at the inn.  Even our neighbors remained in their homes, and more nights than not our only visitor was Dr. Livesey.  He and my mother would retire at once to my father's bedside, and the Captain and I would sit by the fire in silence.  I am ashamed to say how I avoided my father in his sickbed, but I clung, even at that age, to a child's desperate hope that if I pretended all was well, then all would be. 

Once, I caught the Captain with a light in his eyes, as though there was something that he wished to say.  I turned my head away, and he must have thought the better of it.  Sympathy was not in his nature.

I say that.  And yet, all those nights, he never sang.

The final days, when even Dr. Livesey admitted he could do no more - of those, I have no desire to speak. 

In February, then, there were three of us at the Admiral Benbow.  And it was in February that we began receiving strangers in force.

It was another cold, blustery morning, though free of snow.  I was dumping a used ash-bucket, lost in my own dark thoughts, when I saw a man coming slowly down the road. I say a man - for a moment, seeing the hunched figure and his hooded cloak, I thought the stranger Death himself.  A gust of cold wind in my eyes brought me back to my senses.

Only a man. 

He was plainly blind, tapping before him with a stick, and stopped a few rods from me, addressing the air in a sing-song voice.  "Will any kind soul inform a poor blind man, blind in the service of King and Country - god bless them both! - inform him where in this country he may now be?"

"Black Hill Cove," I answered, as brightly as I could.  "The Admiral Benbow."

"Ah!  A young voice.  Will you give me your hand, my friend, and lead me in?"

I half-expected the proffered hand to be grave-cold.  I did not expect the grip, as strong as a vise.  I jerked back, startled, but the man pulled me close, grabbing at my other arm.

"Now boy," he said.  "Take me inside."

"Upon my word -" I began.

"Take me in straight, or I'll break your arm.  You've property inside, and it rightly belongs to me."

Half his face was covered by a misshapen hood, and I tried in vain to see any resemblance to the sea-chest's vanished owner.

He wrenched at my arm, violently enough to make me cry out, and leant in further.  "Come now.  March."  I had never heard a voice so cruel and cold. 

I pushed open the door, my throat dry.  My mother's face flashed through my mind.  I could lead this man to the gold, and he was welcome to it, if he would but leave the rest of us in peace.

The parlor door was open.  I could see the arm of the Captain's accustomed chair, the shadowed silhouette of him within it.  My mother, thank Heaven, was nowhere in evidence.

We passed the parlor, and headed for the stairs.  And then came a most unexpected salvation.

"More rum, Mr. Hawkins!"  A loud, clear, carrying voice.

My assailant dropped my arm as though scalded.  I turned, slamming back into the wall, trying to put as much distance between us as possible. 

His face was suddenly bloodless, his mouth half open.  I will never forget that face.  It was the face of fear, fear as pure as a man on his deathbed.

The air seemed to slow around me.  The blind man choked out a gasp, something that might have been a name, and then he whirled, his cane clattering in shaking hands.  He fell on the way to the door, but scrambled again to his feet, his movements as sharp and jerky as a trapped moth.  He had flapped his way back down the hill before I dared to breathe again, and he may well have been in _Bristol_ before I finally dared to move, peeling myself off the wall and trying to find my footing on shaky knees.

But once courage returned to me, it returned to me in force.  I stepped into the parlor.

The Captain's eyes were slitted open, tracking me through the door.  He didn't speak.

I opened my mouth, closed it again, and found my voice.  "That man.  He knew you."

The Captain raised a brow.  "Did he, now?"  His voice wasn't quite even, and I couldn't tell if it was drink or something more.

"He heard your voice and he _ran._ "  It seemed a shallow way of describing it.  "Who was he?"  _Who are you,_ I almost said, and I would have, a year ago. I realized in that moment that I had never been properly afraid of the Captain.  Fleeing down the hill was a man who might have killed me, and _he_ had been properly afraid of the Captain.

Whoever he was.  _Whatever_ he was. 

"He knew you," I said, again, like a fool.  The Captain's eyes were hard as ice, and his hand was shaking.

" _Rum,_ " he growled, and finally I gave in to flight.

I gave my mother only the briefest details of what had occurred - that a man had come for the sea chest, but been frightened away by the sound of a grown man's voice in the house.  I regretted my lies of omission whenever I saw her with the Captain over the next week.  I had managed to give him the credit of saving my life, and now she refilled his rum glasses, fussed after his health, and refused that month's payment in rent - money that even I knew we desperately needed, for we had one guest, few visitors, and a sea-chest still locked upstairs.

The week passed, otherwise, in some peace.  With a spyglass shamefully stolen from the sea-chest, I kept a close eye on the road.  My next action was to retrieve a knife from the kitchen, which I stored in a stocking beneath my pillow.  With this aid, I was able to sleep soundly, disturbed only by the sudden resurgence of the Captain's musical side.  The dead men on their chest were old friends by this point.  It was the living ones on the road that I feared.

In town on Wednesday, I even received good news, of a sort: old Mrs. Taylor was feeling poorly, with the same cough that always troubled her before spring.  This sent my mother out from the inn more days than not to nurse her, and any time she spent away from the dangers in the sea-chest and the parlor lifted a load off of my back. 

It was on Friday that we received our final visitor.

I watched him all the way up the road.  The figure moved with a birdlike, jumping step, and as I twisted the spyglass, resolved itself into a one-legged man with a crutch.  For all that, the hill seemed to give him little trouble; he paused only once, and that once to stare at our inn with such a narrowed gaze that I swore he was staring down the other end of the glass.

I folded the spyglass, and made my way to the front door.  Once there, I leant against the frame, trying half for the air of a harmless child and half for that of my father.  I can recall the shaking in my hands, and all in all I must have presented a stranger picture to the visitor than I thought at the time, for I greeted his raised hand with a boomed "hullao" through chattering teeth.

I suspect it made little difference to him. 

"Tell me, do you take guests here?"  His smile was not quite as strained as my own.  "I've heard an old friend of mine is-"

"Yes," I managed. 

There was a brief silence.  Pirate, thief, or specter - whatever he was, the visitor didn't shove past me.  I straightened my spine.

"I know why you're here."  A fresh wellspring of courage bubbled up in me, and I glared up at him.  "I'll have no violence in my inn."

His face twitched, just slightly, and then his countenance shifted entirely.  He gave me a sudden, broad smile, and clapped one hand on my shoulder.  "Violence, Mr. Hawkins?  From an old cripple like myself?"

I didn't think to wonder how he knew my name.

"No, no.  I give you my word, sir, one man to another - I'm here to speak, and only to speak."  He squeezed my shoulder briefly, then moved his hand back to rebalance on his crutch.

_One man to another._ Suddenly, I was too puffed full of pride to doubt him.  "The Captain's in the parlor," I told him, in what I fancied was a deep, manly voice.

You may think me a fool, but that was the magic of the man.  In a moment, I had gone from an angry, frightened boy, to the shade of my father, the man of the house, the master of the Admiral Benbow Inn. 

In truth, though, it didn't matter what I was.  The moment the stranger pushed open the parlor door, I could have been a troop of redcoats or King George himself, and he'd have paid me no more heed.  His hands clutched his crutch, white and shaking.

And then the Captain looked up.  An endless moment of silence, then: " _Silver._ "

I made a quick show of closing the door, and then a rather noisier one of going up the stairs, stomping on the first step a dozen times before slipping back towards the parlor door.  The keyhole drew me in like a moth to a flame.

I could see Silver's back, and the edge of the Captain's chair, one white knuckled hand and the shadow of his face.  Long moments passed, and then the Captain spoke again.

"You should have killed me."

"I'm not so sure I didn't."  Silver leant forward, shifting his weight on the crutch.  " _England,_ Flint?"  His laugh was forced, and still as harsh and bitter a thing as any I'd heard from the Captain.

The name Flint meant nothing to me, not then, only the spark of joy at another piece of the puzzle.  I knelt in closer, the doorhandle digging into my head.

The Captain's hand moved, and there was the sound of a gulp of rum.  "I burnt it, you know."

"I thought you might."  Silver leant back, blocking half my view in the process.  "Was it Billy?"

The Captain didn't answer.  There was another slosh of rum, and at that Silver finally moved, one hand pressed against the chair back, his face inches from the Captain's.  I couldn't see the rum bottle move, but I heard it shatter.

"Damn it, James-"

"Don't.  Don't _dare -"_

_"James._ "  Now the rum bottle was joined by the falling crutch, Silver balancing himself entirely on the leg and the chair.  "I'm giving you a choice.  There are a great number of very violent men who are relying on me to return to me with that map.  Draw me another."

"No."  What I could see of the Captain's face was angled away from Silver's.

"I wasn't finished -"

"I'm taking your choice.  _No."_   And in the shadow, a flash of teeth.

" _I wasn't finished._   Draw me a map.  And I will leave.  And I will tell each and every one of those men that Pew's a madman, and you are dead and buried, and I will leave you in peace to drink yourself to death under the very fucking _sign_ of a _British Admiral._   Or-" The anger left him, very suddenly.  He drew in a ragged breath.

"Or?" said the Captain, very quiet.

"Or you won't.  And I won't." 

"No."

"So you keep saying!  For once in your life -"

" _No._   I trusted you, once.  You're a damn fool to think, after everything you've done -"

"Damn you.  Do you think it was _easy?"_   There was a raw edge in Silver's voice, and suddenly I saw nothing but my mother, my mother at my father's deathbed.  "Do you think I _wanted_ it?"

Silver lowered his head, so close now that their faces must have touched.  There was a glimmer of something in the shadows, something that might have been tears.  I barely breathed.

"You won't draw me a map."  Silver's voice was so low as to be barely audible.

"You wouldn't leave even if I did."

" _Bastard."_   But I heard a soft laugh in it now, a true one.  I pressed closer to the keyhole, trying to make something out of the shadows in the chair. They were silent for a long while.

Then, quite suddenly, Silver pulled away, though his hand was still firm on the chair arm. He fixed his eyes on my keyhole.

"Mr. Hawkins!  I think you have somewhere else to be."

And I found that I did.


End file.
